Albert Maasland

Pre-IPO Stock Secondary Market Update | as of Oct 11, 2024 ... In this report: • Page 2: AG Dillon Pre-IPO Stock Venture Capital Fund closing to new investors on Oct 15, 2024 • Page 3-5: Monzo Bank valued at $5.9B following tender offer; OpenAI partners with Hearst; Maven Clinic raises $125M, valued at $1.7B; ByteDance launches AI earbuds, valued at $295B; Cerebras Systems faces IPO delay amid US national security review; Sierra in talks for $4B valuation in new funding round; Numeric raises $28M • Page 6: This Week in Pre-IPO Stocks Podcast • Page 7: AG Dillon Pre-IPO Stock Vintage Index update • Page 8: Current pre-IPO stock secondary market implied valuations • Page 9-10: Pre-IPO Stock revenue multiples • Page 11: Pre-IPO stock secondary market performance

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https://lnkd.in/eY3-AmYM will MoF walk the walk!?.. #JPY strength to play through opts. A very decent chunk of 5s and 7s UST auctions coming up, #SPX500 nearly achieved ideal correction level 4800-4900 range, mega cap earnings and PCE coming up - #highfrolonger still in play, core inflation could actually end up closer to 4.5% towards q3 2024.. QQQ ideal correction more towards 16K, the growth vs value rotation only just started #assetmanagement #qualitybalancesheets

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Excellent analysis that speaks to the need for regulators to shift their focus away from price and number of networks and instead look towards the value delivered to customers and economies from having robust and well invested networks capable of carrying and nurturing new services and products.

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I was recently asked by Bobsguide to write a piece on the role Consumer Duty plays in building trust in embedded finance. At its core, the Duty is not a novel concept, but codifying this principle into enforceable regulatory standards raised expectations for all players in the ecosystem. As Consumer Duty sets new benchmarks, could it improve confidence in embedded finance and chart a path for further growth? One of the most promising aspects of Consumer Duty lies in achieving a truly collaborative process, laying the foundations for responsible innovation. Here is my take on the topic and the importance of playing fair to win over customers: https://lnkd.in/eeWXYRaW #ConsumerDuty #Embeddedfinance"

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Nervous start to the new year for treasurers and for the Chancellor with 30 year gilt yields climbing to their highest level in 27 years (1998 - the year of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal for those with long enough memories!). While credit spreads remain at or near recent lows, higher gilt yields isn't great news given the cost of capital implications for housing, infrastructure, energy, real estate and other assets which rely heavily on gearing and where valuation models are highly sensitive to the cost of debt. The Liz Truss episode (which saw long gilts peaking below their current level) saw an emergency intervention in the gilts market by the Bank of England as a circuit breaker to relieve the pension fund sector. While this part of the market may have de-risked as a result of this episode, the UK Government has a very large gilts issuance programme to roll over existing debt plus the additional borrowing from the October budget. If the current trajectory of gilt yields continues, I wonder how long it will be before fingers are twitching nervously above green buttons on the printing presses in Threadneedle Street... https://lnkd.in/exb5GfhY

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TDR To Become Asda’s Majority Owner After Agreeing To Buy Zuber’s Stake It has been confirmed today that private equity firm TDR Capital will acquire Zuber Issa’s shares in Asda. His brother Mohsin will remain a co-owner of the supermarket they bought along with TDR in 2021. Set to be completed Q3 2024. TDR will then own 67.5% of Asda, Mohsin (22.5%) and Walmart (10%). The transaction further dismantles the business relationship between Zuber and Mohsin, at a time when Asda is losing market share. Mohsin denied rumours of a fallout with his brother, saying on the BBC that the pair “get on exceptionally well”. Commenting on today’s news, Gary Lindsay and Tom Mitchell, Managing Partners of TDR Capital, said: “By combining our investment and sector expertise with Asda’s heritage of delivering value for customers, we have already made significant progress in transforming Asda … As majority owners, we will continue to work closely with the Asda management team and colleagues across the business to support the ambitious strategy, which we believe is the right one to continue to move Asda forward.” Asda’s Chairman, Stuart Rose, commented: “On behalf of the Board, I welcome TDR’s increased investment in Asda – which is a clear sign of its commitment to the business … The Board and shareholders continue to put in place the building blocks to position Asda for long-term success, and that is good news for colleagues, customers, suppliers and other business partners.” Meanwhile, Mohsin said: “Today’s announcement further underlines my own and TDR’s confidence both in Asda and the UK consumer market. As a shareholder group, we are excited about the growth journey we are on … I also want to add my personal support and best wishes for Zuber’s plans as we continue our successful family partnership, working as partners on our personal co-investments, family office philanthropy and Issa Foundation projects.” Zuber concluded: “With the divestment of my Asda shares, I will now turn my attention towards leading and managing the remaining EG UK forecourt sites that I have personally acquired, and spend more time on my charitable endeavours. I am pleased to see TDR increasing its investment in Asda. With Mohsin and TDR’s ongoing focus and shareholding, I am confident that Asda will achieve its growth ambitions.” NamNews Implications: * This means more of a PE influence on how Asda is run… * i.e. see The Implications of Private Equity Takeover of a Mult (Link in comments below) * And why not reassess your retailer handling by business model? – See Tailoring Major Customer Management by Business Model (Vive la Difference?) (Link in comments below) #PrivateEquity

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Back in May 2010 I received a call from The Sun newspaper asking for data and opinion on UK sovereign CDS. Not a typical request (they asked for data back to 1997 - I wonder why?), but it was the eve of the General Election and the eurozone debt crisis was in its full throes. Loose talk of the UK becoming the next Greece was a potent (if spurious) attack line from the then Conservative opposition. UK CDS was trading in excess of 80bps and highly volatile. Fast forward to 2024 and the picture looks somewhat different. The Sun is once again backing the opposition but this time it's Labour. UK CDS is trading around 24bps and the market is indifferent to a probable change in government (if the polls are accurate). Contrast this with France, where the recent election and the surge of the far right has triggered spread widening and volatility. Sovereign CDS is a useful indicator for sovereign credit risk, but there are caveats. Activity in developed market sovereign CDS is often driven by banks' hedging counterparty risk exposure (Credit Valuation Adjustment), which is largely motivated by regulatory and accounting factors, rather than pure credit risk. And liquidity also has to be taken into consideration. Its generally robust in many names but can be patchy. So its crucial to have the right data and understand what underpins it. And perhaps read the quality press! Data source: S&P Global Market Intelligence N.B. Spreads are 2003 contract for historical consistency

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Mergers of UK investment trusts make sense to build scale and efficiencies which should result in lower fees for investors. This is natural given the performance trends and shift to lower cost index-based products. One “benefit” that you rarely see mentioned during these announcements is that by combining, you can merge away the performance history of underperforming managers. While Alliance Trust has outperformed its benchmark on a 1,3 and 5 year basis on both a NAV and share price basis (including its use of leverage vs an unleveraged benchmark) as of May, Witan has underperformed over the same time periods. Any guess which will be the surviving performance history? Elliot Gulliver-Needham #indexinvesting

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So with a week to go before the new UK government kicks off its flagship investment summit in London in the presence of Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer and his Chancellor, it is reported that the cornerstone investor has pulled out of a planned £1 bn investment in expanding the London Gateway deep sea container port (which first opened in 2013). Why? Because other key UK ministers from the same government, including the Transport Secretary (no, I don't know who she is either - apparently a professional politician who's total life experience outside politics is a 3 year stint in 'public policy'), and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (another politician devoid of commercial experience but replete with history as a senior trade unionist), have been calling publicly for a boycott of a major subsidiary of the same investor. Of course to concede is that the Labour Party's union paymasters have had big issues with that subsidiary in the past, and now in government comes the chance to address such issues. However, calling for a public boycott, especially at the same time as you expect the same decision-makers to step into major infrastructure investment, would seem not the way to do that - as any commercial negotiator would know. Worse is that the Deputy PM and Transport minister both appear to have been spouting off in total ignorance of what the PM and Chancellor from their own party were planning to launch just next week - very literally the Left hand not knowing (or maybe caring) what the Right hand was doing. The latest crop of ministers must realise that words from politicians have economic consequences, which are often not the intended ones. https://lnkd.in/eFYhbXBb

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Caveat Emptor/Caveat Venditor Interesting 'reported' development with the putative sale of The Hundred by Elizabeth ammon in The Times yesterday. This follows some exaggerated/sensationalist commentary and financial information publicly shared by Lalit Modi over the last months. Over the coming weeks, as author of The Financial Review of ECB Finances in April 2023, I will write more fully on the many factors surrounding the sale of The Hundred. This is the first of many updates. What is clear is that Dwayne Spradlin’s Harvard Business Review (“Are you Solving the Right Problem?” September 2012) is as relevant to the game’s current governing body - the England and Wales Cricket Board ('ECB') - as it is to a bog-standard widget factory. Spradlin observes that “most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problem they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important”. Spradlin challenges the decisions taken, and how in hindsight alternative routes should have been made, or even that a decision once made, can concerningly address the wrong problem. The key, he eruditely highlights, stems from asking the right questions at the start so that the right problem is ultimately tackled. Which begs the question, who asks the right questions and scrutinises decisions made by the ECB and is the right problem ultimately being tackled? Cricket in the UK, at the county and recreational level, is essentially run by well-intentioned, heavily-overworked and stretched volunteer boards, which are transitory in nature and comply in general with Sport England best practice. Whilst ensuring freshness of tenure, there remains limited corporate memory for stakeholders, or owners of the ECB, to appropriately challenge and review how the ECB is operating and above all else for whom and indeed why historic and future decisions are made. So, in reality, probably no one at county, recreational, national or political level properly challenges and scrutinises what the ECB does, and no one who will be around to deal with the consequences of its actions. Vikram Banerjee, the ECB’s director of business operations in The Guardian on 30th May 2024 was quoted as saying the aim in the potential sale is “to seek partners with expertise to help us take the competition to the next level, while ensuring any investment benefits the whole game” alongside the chance “to engage new global strategic partners to help us unlock the future potential of the Hundred”.   This appears a potentially honest acceptance that the ECB, despite significant internal spend over the last decade, doesn’t have sufficient in-house expertise to create value. Hence the desire for other partners to invest now to share in future value creation and also providing near term salvation/liquidity for many cash strapped counties. I'll explore many financial and strategic factors from a buyers' and sellers' perspective. More to follow. #TheHundred #cricket #economicsofsport

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The Takeover Panel must go! The Takeover Code once served a purpose but now stands in the way, giving too much agency to board directors whose interests are not aligned with those of shareholders. This is one of the reasons #UK #equity #markets trade at a perennial discount to the U.S. Relax the Code, and let bids go to shareholders for votes- and you will see that more often than not, the owners want exits. This will allow for the much-needed recalibration in British equities. #investing #shareholderactivism #lse

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Lots of helpful (and quite profound) insights from Brendan O'Neill at spiked LTD in this article but the one that caught my attention was in his concluding comments which the following quote captures well. "Let’s be honest about what is going on here: yesterday’s gatekeepers of thought and opinion are incensed that the internet age has chipped away at their old-world authority. They cannot believe they no longer enjoy a monopoly of information and ideas...............The new clerisy might be secular and woke, rather than godly and conservative, but it shares with its forebears a feverish anxiety over the liberty to speak. It isn’t Musk they fear so much as what he has facilitated – a world in which one can speak even when one’s ideas offend the ruling class." Many of the traditional mainstream media outlets (and academic institutions) are losing their audiences in tandem with their credibility. The "unstoppable rise of 'unmediated' media" certainly has put their noses out of joint and as Brendan O'Neill quite rightly says 'That there exists a popular publishing platform that is beyond the reach of both their moral judgement and their punitive interventions shakes them to their core.' The increasing utilisation and audience of the unmediated media speaks volumes. It is well time that the mainstream journalists start to look, listen, investigate and report with a less wokish and elitist mindset. The Hon. Peter Dutton MP Nick Cater The Australian Financial Review https://lnkd.in/gCpvwSZM

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UK Gilt Market: Déjà Vu from the 2022 Crisis? 📉💷 The UK gilt market is under intense pressure again, echoing the turmoil seen during the 2022 LDI crisis. Following the recent budget announcement by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the scale of additional borrowing has pushed the 10-year gilt yields to 4.45%, nearing the peak levels last witnessed in the aftermath of Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget. Investors are concerned that Labour’s “tax, borrow, and spend” approach could require even more gilt issuance in the coming months, putting pressure on bond markets. The increased borrowing raises questions about the UK’s fiscal sustainability, with potential long-term effects on interest rates, inflation, and investor confidence. As the markets adjust, memories of 2022’s LDI-driven gilt collapse serve as a stark reminder of the risks inherent in fiscal policy shifts of this scale. #UKEconomy #GiltMarket #BondYields #Investing #FiscalPolicy

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We have officially launched BlueX following our newly granted licence from the Jersey Financial Services Commission (JFSC). BlueX is an integrated FX execution platform, designed to support optimal trading decisions, leveraging data and analytics to minimise market impact.   Our platform differentiates itself, by seamlessly integrating unique trading features and advanced third-party tools into customised workflows. This innovative approach sets us apart from existing FX trading technology providers.   Thank you to everyone who has supported us in bringing BlueX to market. This is just the beginning. If you would like to learn more about how BlueX can transform your trading experience, please contact me or @Teddy Russ Teddy Russ.   #FXTrading #FinancialTechnology #TradingSolutions #FX

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A step in the right direction, but c'mon...how difficult do they need to make this? The lemmings of the #UK institutional investment sector want a more globally competitive domestic market but insist on tying the hands of the boards, preventing them from competing globally. It's not that hard - The Investment Association should simply instruct these boards to find the best and most experienced talent available and provide competitive, well-aligned pay packages across both executive directors and non-executive directors. If you don't compete, you can't win. #investing #stocks #corporategovernance #shareholderactivism

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There's interesting analysis in the Telegraph of a £4.7bn takeover offer from Abu Dhabi-led consortium for Hargreaves Lansdown. HL was a big success story for decades. But competition from cheaper rivals and reputational damage resulting from the Woodford scandal have weighed heavily. For me, the company faces two big problems. First, the fees its charges are unsustainably high (its 0.45% platform fee especially). But secondly, and more importantly, its USP — the notion that it can identify, in advance, the star fund managers of the future — has been shown to be an illusion. HL has the potential to be a force for good in UK financial services.. But it has to go back to the drawing board first. #Investing #FinancialAdvice #AssetManagement https://lnkd.in/eiD2cn9X

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